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Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Shame and the Captives by Tom Keneally. Shame and the Captives by Tom Keneally. Thomas Keneally. Based on true events, this beautifully rendered novel from the author of Schindler's List and The Daughters of Mars brilliantly explores a World War II prison camp, where Japanese prisoners resolve to take drastic action to wipe away their shame. Alice is a young woman living on her father-in-law's farm on the edge of an Australian country town, while her Shame and the Captives is held pr Based Shame and the Captives true events, this beautifully rendered novel from the author of Schindler's List and The Daughters of Mars brilliantly explores a World War II prison camp, where Japanese prisoners resolve to Shame and the Captives drastic action to wipe away their shame. Alice is a young woman living on her father-in-law's farm on the edge of an Australian country town, while her husband is held prisoner in Europe. When Giancarlo, an Italian anarchist at the prisoner-of-war camp down the road, is assigned to work on the Shame and the Captives, she hopes that being kind to him will somehow influence her husband's treatment. What she doesn't anticipate is how dramatically Giancarlo will expand her outlook and self-knowledge. But what most challenges Alice and her fellow townspeople is the utter foreignness of the thousand-plus Japanese inmates and their culture, which the camp commanders fatally misread. Mortified by being taken alive in battle and preferring a violent death to the shame of living, they plan an outbreak, to shattering and far-reaching effects on Shame and the Captives the citizens around them. In a career spanning half a century, Thomas Keneally has proved a master at exploring ordinary lives caught up in extraordinary events. With this profoundly gripping and thought-provoking novel, inspired by a notorious incident in New South Wales inhe once again shows why he is celebrated as a writer who looks into the heart of the human condition with a piercing intelligence that few can match. Get A Copy. Hardcoverpages. Published February 24th by Atria Books first published More Details Original Title. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Shame and the Captivesplease sign up. How does it compare with 'After darkness' by Christine Piper? See 1 question about Shame and the Captives…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Shame and the Captives. Marvelous storytelling and character development that shines a light for me on the relativism of morality in the time of war. The tale brings to life the odd historical event of a massive prison break Shame and the Captives Japanese POWs at a small town in New South Wales in We get a window on the lives of the British and Australians running the camp, the program of work in the community set up for trustworthy prisoners, and the accommodation of local farmers and the town to the camp and prisoners they encoun Marvelous storytelling and character development that shines a light for me on the relativism of morality in the time of war. We get a window on the lives of the British Shame and the Captives Australians running the camp, the program of work in the community set up for trustworthy prisoners, and the accommodation of local farmers and the town to the camp and prisoners they encounter. All are flawed in their distorted understanding of each other, and all struggle under our judging vision to show us some kind of honor on the home front while the madness of war rages elsewhere. She kindly serves lemonade to Japanese prisoners who are laboring on shoveling rocks on the roadway. Her action is like a prayer that somewhere someone will be similarly kind to her husband. But the prisoners appear sullen and reticent to accept such special comfort and seem dangerous because of their close supervision by armed soldiers. Colonel Abercare is a career British soldier too old and ineffectual to attain a battlefield command. Major Suttor is an Australian reservist, who despises the imperial pomposity of the Brits and from his experience writing for a radio show equivalent of a soap opera feels he feels he is attuned to common man. Their interplay was very engaging to me. They are at odds on how to handle the implacable Japanese prisoners, who resist any form of cooperation or even human communication. Our representative jailers, who daily face the smoldering resentment of their charges, are highly motivated to keep things under civilized control: Abercare from his ambitions to advance in rank and to keep in good graces with his estranged, aristocratic wife; Suttor to satisfy the watchful eyes of the Red Cross inspectors so that his own son will not be mistreated as a Japanese POW. Thus, we are set up for a tragedy, with the elusiveness of power and control as a trickster and shame as a hidden force. Through the perspectives of two Japanese characters, one a young elite fighter pilot Tengan and the other an older infantry sergeant AokiI finally got a glimmer of understanding of a mindset that has baffled me after a wide diversity of readings. How Shame and the Captives understand the kamikaze pilots, the bushido samurai spirit of honor in fighting to Shame and the Captives last man, or the thousands of Japanese soldiers who would leap off cliffs at Saipan rather than surrender? Instead, we get here a much more comprehensible perspective of individual variations in personality and loyalty to the larger cause. As Alice gets to Shame and the Captives this Giancarlo while teaching him English, she is relieved to learn he was not a Fascist. He explains that he is an anarchist, which she has trouble comprehending: States make war. Therefore, no states, no war. Absolute rubbish. This interest is very dangerous for Giancarlo, and her selfish attempts Shame and the Captives exert power over him makes for a fascinating analog for corrupted humanity as a collateral damage of this war. How the outbreak of the Japanese comes to intersect their moral wrestling makes for a surprising and moving resolution to the drama of this story. This book was provided by the publisher through the Netgalley program. View all 14 comments. Most Australians of a certain age have heard of the Cowra Breakout. This was the largest prison escape of World War II. During the escape Shame and the Captives the manhunt that followed, Japanese soldiers and four Australian soldiers were killed. Many of the Japanese soldiers who died were either ki Most Australians of a certain age have heard of the Cowra Breakout. Many of the Japanese soldiers who died were either killed by other prisoners or committed suicide. All of the surviving escapees were captured and imprisoned. There were no civilian casualites, the escapees having been ordered by their leaders not to harm Australian civilians. In fictionalising the Cowra Breakout story, Keneally doesn't stray far from history, even though Cowra becomes Gawell and the names of the main players are changed. The narrative focuses on the camp commandant, the officer in charge of that part of the camp from which the escape Shame and the Captives, a young married woman whose husband is a prisoner of war in Europe, an Italian prisoner and several of the Japanese prisoners. Keneally is at his best when exploring Shame and the Captives motivation of the Japanese escapees. These are men for whom captivity equals Shame and the Captives and who are convinced that the only way in which they can achieve honour is through death. In effect, the escape was a group suicide attempt. However, a real strength of the novel is that Keneally doesn't generalise: the Japanese soldiers are as individual as the other characters. The most signficant weakness of the work is its pace. The set up, with its introduction to the various characters is reasonably slow and the middle of the novel drags somewhat. However, the build up and aftermath of the escape are worth the wait. Overall, this is an interesting work Shame and the Captives a favourite theme of Keneally's: cultural misunderstanding in all its forms. This work is both more conventional and less moving than that novel. However, this is still a novel worth reading. Apr 18, Bettie Shame and the Captives it it was ok Shelves: springhistorical- fictionaustraliaprisonerwwiipublishedtragedybettie-s-law-of-excitement-lostsnoozefestjapan. Sure felt as if Keneally did just that with this one. Shame and the Captives lacked both spark and enthusiasm, however I did learn a lot by engaging with this book as it sent me scurrying to the interwebz to look up the gen. View all 3 comments. I wanted to read this because I loved other books by this author most notably Schindler's List and most recently The Daughters Shame and the Captives Mars. I was taken by the author's noteswriting and thoughts at the beginning. Fiction has always tried to tell the truth by telling liesby fabrication. There are also Italian POW's but their story is not the center of the novel and we see only bit of the Italian perspective in the character of Giancarlo who works on Duncan's Alice's father in law farm as part of the program that sends prisoners to work for farmers in the area The next chapters telling of the capture of two of the prisoners gives the cultural perspective on honor and what it meant to be captured. They preferred death to capture and death rather than bringing dishonor to their families. While these chapters shed light on what happens later, and give understanding to the seminal event of the novelit was slow paced in parts and I found my interest Shame and the Captives. I felt bogged down at times by too many points of view - Aiko, TenganGoda to name a fewbut then when the narrative would get back to Alice's story and to Abercare the British colonel 's story my interest picked up again. In addition to depicting the BreakoutKeneally has embedded some other story lines that show the impact of the warnot just on the prisoners. Having read the intro and been so taken Shame and the Captives the author's thoughts on fiction and telling the story of what happened, I moved on with it since I was curious to see how this historic event would play out. Shame and the Captives by Tom Keneally

Outlander star Sam Heughan narrates a new animated film about the last fairy of Scotland - how to watch it. I can believe this, and not only because his practice has often been to fasten on some real-life story, usually a Shame and the Captives complex one, brood on it, re-arrange it, and make a novel of it. Shame and the Captives is a story that has been germinating for a long time, indeed since he was a boy of nine or ten. One night in August,more than a thousand Japanese prisoners of war, preferring death to the disgrace of capture and imprisonment, attempted an escape from a camp on the outskirts of a town called Cowra in New South Wales. The Australian military guards were ill-prepared. Some prisoners escaped into the bush. Over the next week they were all rounded up or accounted for; two-thirds of them were killed and most of the others taken were wounded. There were four Australian deaths. It is said to have been the biggest POW break-out in modern times, and, not unnaturally, sparked a panic in the local farming community. The narrative is gripping, slow-moving but absorbing for the first half and more of the novel, then fast-moving, exciting and appalling. Keneally Shame and the Captives not a novelist who stints on action. It is the clash of cultures which fascinates him. We have two groups of people who simply cannot understand each other, cannot indeed even begin to come to an understanding. Conversely, the Japanese camp-leaders, notably the young pilot Tengan, are convinced that the Australians will shoot them when the war ends. Tengan is the leader of those who prefer to seek death on their own terms. In any case, they believe their families will already have mourned them as dead, because they know it was their duty to die in battle. The Australians are credibly ordinary. The camp commander, actually an ex-officer of the British Army, is a quietly decent man concerned with keeping things on an even keel, worried about his post-war future, and trying to Shame and the Captives a marriage damaged by his adultery. Shame and the Captives there is Alice, living on a farm with her dull and decent father-in-law while her husband is another POW, but in a German rather than Japanese camp. She is attracted to the Italian prisoner sent to work on the farm. The Italians, as represented by Giancarlo, serve as a contrast to Shame and the Captives Japanese. Imprisonment may be a misfortune, but is no occasion for shame — life goes on. The anti-Fascists among them are even quite happy to be in Australia. One suspects that Giancarlo may remain there if he is allowed Shame and the Captives do so. Keneally has always been a fine story-teller, writing a plain and serviceable well-mannered prose, without affectations, and his novels have always been distinguished by their humanity Shame and the Captives his discriminating moral sense. Here he has made a remarkable, and largely successful attempt to get into the minds of people very different from himself, surely one of the marks of the true novelist. The ideas and actions of his Japanese characters are, from the Australian point of view, utterly foreign, bizarre, even crazy, and repulsive. He makes them comprehensible. This is a remarkable achievement. News you can trust since Sign in Edit Account Sign Out. Picture: Reuters. Sign up. Thanks for signing up! Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Arts and Culture. Heritage and Retro. Food and Drink. Future Scotland. Must Read. Advertise My Business. Getting out. Shame and the Captives Notices. Shame and the Captives by Thomas Keneally – review | Books | The Guardian

In Gawell, New South Wales, a prisoner-of-war camp to house European, Korean and Japanese captives Shame and the Captives built close to a farming community. Alice is a young woman living a dull life with her father-in-law on his farm while her new husband first fights, then is taken Shame and the Captives, in Greece. Driven by a desperate need to validate the Shame and the Captives already held for them in Japan, the prisoners vote to take part in an outbreak, and the bloodshed and chaos this precipitates shatter the certainties and safeties of all who inhabit the region. Tom Keneally. Thomas Keneally was born in and his first novel was published in Since then he has written a considerable number of novels and non-fiction works. Shame and the Captives is an example of fine writing that has the power to entice modern readers and those interested in the truthful reflection of the human spirit, no matter the place, culture or generation. Keneally is not a novelist who stints on action. Here he has made a remarkable, and largely successful attempt to get into the minds of people very different from himself, surely one Shame and the Captives the marks of the true novelist. This is a remarkable achievement. Then he turns, with a virtuosity Shame and the Captives has rarely matched, to giving us - through select, concentrated detail - a sense of the wider lives of the participants in this story, for all that our acquaintance with them is partial. Keneally's gift, and his blessing to the many hundreds of characters he has created, is always to find the extraordinary within the ordinary. Each of them rises out of and above their varying backgrounds: the class, religion, ambition that mark but do not define them. The title of the novel, Shame and the Captiveshas a deliberate ambiguity and a measure of awkwardness that makes us pause to consider the moral complexity of yet another Shame and the Captives Keneally's grand entertainments. He gives vivid human faces to the victims and the perpetrators of war. He weaves his magic and the reader falls under his spell. Keneally negotiates the separate and intertwining narratives with his usual elegance and skill. No one equals Keneally for documenting the actions of human beings caught up in war, some desperate to hold onto their humanity, others desperate to die. Here, as in The Daughters of Mars and other relatively recent novels, there is an intelligence and a mastery of conventional modes of narrative. Shame and the Captives entertains and informs, and that alone is a considerable achievement. Keneally is, of course, famous for his ability to put a human face on both perpetrators and victims of war, but this novel excels in its haunting portrayal of not just individuals, but of the yawning chasm between the cosmologies Shame and the Captives inhabit. At its most basic, Shame and the Captives is a retelling of the Cowra breakout. Something which was long overdue. But it is much more than that. Keneally cleverly and effortlessly divides his story into many sub stories and embeds his reader into each one. We mingle with Japanese POWs, hear their stories, feel their shame and share their frustrations; we are sent out to the farms as Shame and the Captives with the Italian POWs; we wait out the war far from the frontlines with the British and Australian camp guards and officers; we share in the guilt and confusion of a woman who's trying to remember her captured husband's face whilst an attractive Italian POW labours away for her father-in-law in the sun outside her window. All the while trouble brews. We know the story of the Cowra breakout. We have never had it told like this. Like all good historical fiction we are reminded that history does not happen to others in some remote place, history happens to all of us and every day. All in all a really enjoyable novel, I read in two days eager to find out how it all ended, even though I knew exactly how it was going to end. If you are a Tom Shame and the Captives fan expect the usual: well researched, multilayered novel on a Shame and the Captives topic where ordinary people take center stage. Shame and the Captives is also a kind of book that will probably make you want to discover a little bit more about this tragic episode in both Australian and Japanese history. Shame and the Captives is a thought-provoking book that seems very timely. This year is the anniversary of the beginning of 'the war to end all wars'. There will be no escaping the memorialising of that conflict. But in this book, set in the somnolent winter sunshine of western NSW, Keneally has captured a side of military conflict that is rarely explored in historical novels set in wartime. The writing is meticulous and utterly unshowy. The slumbrous, dour rhythms of country life and the mordant Aussie patois are just right. Individual relationships, homicidal or homely, counterpoint the public moments of tumult and fanaticism. It's a story that gathers momentum like a landslide. And, Shame and the Captives usual with Keneally, it's rich with meditations on human failings and yearnings. His incredible facility as a teller of tales, is undimmed. Rich, complex, deeply empathetic novel. Along the fault-lines of this violent event, Keneally locates his compelling study of the cultural differences Shame and the Captives nations brought into conflict by war. Shame and the Captives is a tremendously accomplished novel, rich in character, detail and incident. It is the Shame and the Captives of a master novelist who shows no sign of slowing down, and for this we should be grateful. We are all prisoners, Keneally is telling us, of culture, relationships, the past. It is a tribute to his consummate skill as a fabricator of fiction that the final, apocalyptic shattering of the mirror feels inevitable. Keneally shares his deeply believable and flawed characters' conflicting perspectives sensitively and with great empathy,expressing the full range of humanity Shame and the Captives a few hundred pages. He does an extraordinary job of making all his characters compelling and sympathetic, with fully formed back stories, even those whose perspectives are likely to be the most "foreign" to the reader…. Keneally blends history, romance and wartime intrigue in a remarkable piece of historical fiction with a strong sense of place and time. Search books and authors. Buy from…. View all online retailers Find local retailers. About the author Tom Keneally Thomas Keneally was born in and his first novel was published in He has held various academic posts in the United States, but lives in Sydney. Also by Tom Keneally. Praise for Shame and the Captives. Allan Massie, The Scotsman Then he turns, with a virtuosity he has rarely matched, to giving us - through select, concentrated detail - a sense of the wider lives of the participants in this story, for all that our acquaintance with them is partial. Peter Pierce, The Australian He gives vivid human faces to the victims and the perpetrators of war. Carmel Bird, The Guardian No one Shame and the Captives Keneally for documenting the actions of human beings caught up in war, some desperate to hold onto their humanity, others desperate to Shame and the Captives. Publishers Weekly Here, as in The Daughters of Mars and other relatively recent novels, there is an intelligence and a mastery of conventional modes of narrative. Andrew Riemer, The Age Keneally is, of course, famous for his ability to put a human face on both perpetrators and victims of war, but this novel excels in its haunting portrayal of not just individuals, but of the yawning chasm between the cosmologies they Shame and the Captives. John Purcell, Booktopia Buzz Like all good historical fiction we are reminded that history does not happen to others in some remote place, history happens to all of us and every day. Mail on Sunday Keneally shares his deeply believable and flawed characters' conflicting perspectives sensitively and with great empathy,expressing the full range of humanity in a few hundred pages. Related titles. The Godmothers. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams. The Thursday Murder Club. Agent Sonya. Girl, Woman, Other. The Yield. Grown Ups. The Testaments. To Kill A Mockingbird. A Gentleman in Moscow. The Giver of Stars. Islands of Mercy. Just Like You. The Last Migration. Roald DahlQuentin Blake. Dirt Music. The Choice. Miss Benson's Beetle. Man's Search Shame and the Captives Meaning. Our top books, exclusive content and competitions. Straight to your inbox. Sign up to our newsletter using your email. Enter your email to sign up. Thank you! Your subscription to Read More was successful. To help us recommend your next Shame and the Captives, tell us what you enjoy reading. Add your interests.